The short answer is that anything could melt
ice! It just has to be hot enough.

This “hotness,” or heat, is a type of energy,
and hot things have a lot of energy, while cold
things have less energy. Nature wants hot
things, like a metal ball, to give its energy to
the cold things touching it (like the air in a
room). The hot metal ball will want to give off
energy, so it goes into the air that is touching
it. This happens until the metal ball and the air
have the SAME “hotness” or energy.

Let’s think of ice melting if you leave it out
on a table. The ice will be cold. The air will be
warm around it , and this warmness will transfer
to the ice, making the ice warmer. Once the ice
gets too warm, we start to see it melt, which is
what we thought would happen! But while the ice
gets warmer, the air around it actually gets
colder! To demonstrate this we will look now at a
cup of ice water.

Water will be room temperature, and we want to
make it cold. Now we drop the ice into our cup of
water. By touching the ice, the water will
transfer its heat to the ice. This means the ice
will lose some of its “coldness” to the water,
making the water colder. At the same time, the
water will lose some of its “warmness”, or energy,
to the ice, and the ice will start to melt. Hope
this helps!

Answer 2:

Heat makes ice melt, although salt can also make
ice melt with less heat (you still need heat
though).

Answer 3:

Most things that will mix with or dissolve in
water will make ice melt, depending on the
temperature. This is not just true for water,
if you mix a little bit of some material into some
other material, the melting point of that
second material will drop. How far it will drop
varies depending on the added material. The
material that is commonly used to remove ice on
streets is simple table salt (but not as clean as
the salt you use for cooking) because it is cheap
and not very hazardous and it lowers the melting
point of ice quite a bit. But you could experiment
with different water soluble household materials
and see if they also work, such as baking soda,
alcohol, sugar...

Best,

Answer 4:

Technically, any sort of material can make
ice melt. Ice melts above a temperature 32
degrees Fahrenheit, so as long as the ice is in an
environment above that temperature, it will melt
into liquid form, which is water! You can make ice
melt faster though, in many ways. Crushing ice
up into small bits will make it melt faster
because it increases the surface area touching the
outside air. Ice and sugar also make ice melt
faster, by lowering water’s freezing point.